Categories
Brexit behaving badly – politicalbetting.com
Brexit behaving badly – politicalbetting.com
As far as you are concerned, is Brexit ‘done’?All BritonsIt is done: 24%It is not done: 54%Leave votersDone: 30%Not done: 53%Remain votersDone: 22%Not done: 60%https://t.co/2xXTAoRjVa pic.twitter.com/yzMY5NkWJn
0
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
FPT. I have a centre near me with company shops for Le Creuset, Procook, Denby and Tefal.
Le Creusets strike me as the kind of thing that would smash a floortile should I involuntarily explore its bounciness. And £200+++ is a bit much, even for a generational stew pot.
They seem to be doing quite a bit of discounting (half price adverts online today), and I think are suffering because there are now other 'brands' which are very nearly as good at a small fraction of the price.
I'd say that AGA are more resilient, but they need to keep working on the efficiency.
Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond are set to leave The Grand Tour, bringing an end to their 20-year presenting partnership.
The men, who hosted the BBC series Top Gear from 2003, have all decided to leave the series on Amazon Prime after five seasons.
Asked if they were leaving, Clarkson told The Times: “We’re done. I have reviewed cars on TV since 1989. That’s 34 years. And after next year, I won’t be doing that any more.
...Clarkson is set to release at least one more series of his popular programme Clarkson’s Farm, also on Amazon. May, 60, also stars in travelogues for the streamer where he has visited Japan and Italy, with a new series in India due soon.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/presenters-set-to-bring-down-curtain-on-grand-tour-f767p80zb
Britain is on a “direction of travel” towards eventually rejoining the European Union, the president of the European Commission has claimed, suggesting it is up to the next generation to reverse Brexit.
Ursula von der Leyen described the signing of the Windsor framework — to amend the controversial Northern Ireland protocol — as “a new beginning for old friends”.
She suggested that eventually it would be up to her children to “fix” the mistakes of the generation that had allowed Brexit to happen in the first place.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/next-generation-will-reverse-brexit-von-der-leyen-says-9k8trkh78
(am glum now)
Clarkson's Farm is much better, its still got the Top Gear "oh look I have done a woopsie" without turning the whole show into one massive staged Some Mothers Do Have Em episode.
So they are not slinking away in disgrace
However with Clarkson revealing that he now needs a hearing aid so as to avoid dementia, it is probably time. At some point it becomes ludicrous
- Shane MacGowan
- Henry Kissinger
- Alaistair Darling
- Jimmy Corkhill
- The Grand Tour
- Top Gear
who's next...I do wonder if PM Starmer will briskly push through Single Market membership (without a referendum). What’s the point in a 200 seat majority if you don’t use it to do something dramatic. This would be it
He will never get a better chance than in his first year or two, Blair’s premiership teaches us that
I do love the photo over on the BBC of a younger Darling who looks like a cross between Noel Edmonds and a Klingon.
The uncooperative presence of a populist-led Netherlands could wreck Brussels’ flagship legislative projects.
By Wolfgang Münchau"
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2023/11/geert-wilders-victory-netherlands-threat-european-union
I mean, HMG hasn't even got the customs completely sorted out yet!
But if Keir is looking for measures to deliver growth, this is an obvious one, and looks to have quite widespread support now.
Trainspotting. 14 perfect songs.
Embrace it people.
(Bizarrely, it' not available on Spotify. So here's a playlist someone created on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPAfi7VbU4g&list=PLkdH33fATc7ugUi9E3Y7rXGNQlBp9E5RG&ab_channel=BaseAllMighty)
* Not Henry Kissinger, obviously
And it was used as recently as Tuesday to sear a steak.
So, not inexpensive. But quite capable of lasting a lifetime.
Among my circle of American friends, Clarkson is best known for his farm.
a) A plurality, perhaps a majority, of UK population wanted in fact to be in the single market except for FOM
b) A majority would have been happy with a reformed EU, with a few more derogations as we had over the Euro
c) A lot of people wanted the trade alliance but not the ever closer political union (flag, pseudo parliament, anthems, rhetoric)
d) The referendum didn't offer what most people wanted and Cameron failed to get - reform of the EU
e) Brexit won because it ran a marginally less execrable campaign than Remain. partly they were both terrible because what we wanted wasn't on offer
f) Its only real merit was being out of FOM
g) But net migration last year was +700,000. So what's the point? We may as well have SM+Bulgarian fruit pickers as no SM+Paraguayan fruit pickers.
But in the absence of a referendum, it does need a clear electoral mandate in terms of a manifesto commitment.
'Rejoin' *would* need a referendum, IMO, manifesto commitment or not. It'd be such a significant constitutional change and the EU would probably want one before ratification too, to minimise the risk of more in-out hokey-cokey nonsense.
Whatever is decided in the longer term, it will be via a manifesto rather than a referendum - no sane politician would touch another EU referendum with a bargepole.
The star item (ie I like it) is probably an Old Hall Robert Welch Oriana stainless steel teapot etc, which is still modern and more functional than any other I have seen.
Oh.
Cliché, I know, but the book is far, far better than the film. And the film is brilliant. Takes some time to get used to it being written in Scottish accent/dialect but once it clicks in your head you're away.
Well worth a read if you haven't already.
Choose a job, choose a career, choose a family, choose a * big television.
I’ll take a guess you did all of that, and didn’t choose something else?
pabula ?
Trainspotting is a great film, probably the film of our generation. I remember going to see a screening with a Q&A with Danny Boyle and John Hodge afterwards when it came out. John Hodge signed my copy of the screenplay. Irvine Welsh was the novelist of our generation, too, in Scotland at least. His books were everywhere in a way I've not seen with any other writer.
But I'm going to kick it, don't worry.
"The leaders of the Occupation should know, October 7th was just a rehearsal""
https://twitter.com/gaza_report/status/1730241713472414075
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/30/alistair-darling-put-country-before-party-and-saved-the-un/
“It says a great deal about the man that across the disparate parties and interests of Better Together, there was virtually unanimous support for Darling’s appointment as chair. To his efforts can be attributed the defeat of the nationalist project (if not the nationalists themselves) and the continuation of the world’s most successful political, economic and social Union.”
Was also my experience when I sired mixed race kids.
There was a drug problem even in a tiny town like provincial Uttoxeter, in the late 1980s, at least.
I've seen loads of clips, and I daresay it's well-acted and well-written, but it's just not my cup of tea. Or syringe of heroin.
Perhaps I missed out on something. But there are certain types of films I just don't like. Courtroom dramas bore me (sorry, all PB's lawyers). Mafia films ditto. Though to be fair, there are exceptions in each category.
"In less than four years during the early 1970s, Mr. Kissinger brokered the opening of relations between the United States and China, the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, major arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union, and Israeli-Arab accords that made the United States the dominant power in the Middle East."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/29/henry-kissinger-legacy-debate/
Second, from conservative columnist George Will, this reminder:
"A decade after Kissinger left the State Department, communism, whose confidence flowed from Marxism’s economic determinism, absorbed a brutal, indeed fatal, lesson in the importance of economic factors. In 1976, Ronald Reagan challenged Ford for the Republican nomination by running against Kissingerism. And at the 1986 summit in Iceland, Reagan icily told Mikhail Gorbachev that if there were to be an intensified arms race, he, Reagan, could guarantee that America would win it. The statesman’s task, Kissinger believed, is “to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.” He helped manage the Cold War until the nation chose a president determined not to manage it but to win it."
source$:https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/29/henry-kissinger-legacy-george-will/
(For the record: In 1979, I broke out laughing when I realized that Reagan would probably win the Republican nomination -- and that I would probably be voting for him.)
https://www.railway.supply/en/explosion-in-the-severomuysky-tunnel-in-buryatia-on-the-baikal-amur-mainline/
It’s still a source of shame, when really it oughtn’t to be, realising the pallid pastiness of oneself and one’s children on holiday next to the healthy poreless skin, athletic physique and golden blond hair of the Swedish and Dutch kids.
He was an absolute peace of shit. And I don't say that lightly.
There are various smaller parties on the right with 12 seats in total, so PVV+BBB+smaller with VVD support might work.
If you take the second to fifth best performing parties, GL-PvdA, VVD, NSC and D66, you would have enough for a majority grand coalition (79).
Trainspotting had too much running.
I feel the need to do a thread on voting systems to educate PBers.
Immediately before the vote, yougov polling showed that a substantial minority of Leave voters (enough to make it a majority of the overall poll) would favour joining EFTA and the EEA and so retaining freedom of movement. It should have been taken seriously as an option at the time rather than rattling on about the 'purity' of Brexit.
I lay the blame for this almost entirely at the feet of the succession of post Brexit governing parties with a small but significant dollop of blame being thrownvat those Remainer MPs who were only interested in overturning the vote.
I still maintain that this is where we will eventually land but we will have wasted years to get there.
https://ukandeu.ac.uk/explainers/the-european-political-community/
"Third, we will have a new UK-EU trading relationship. There is a European free trade zone from Iceland to the Russian border and we will be part of it. [...]
"The EU’s supporters say ‘we must have access to the Single Market’. Britain will have access to the Single Market after we vote leave."
If Starmer delivers entry to a European free trade zone from Iceland to the Russian border, phrasing that seems to define the EEA to me, then presumably Leavers will be OK with that?
Then an afternoon discovering the deepest reaches of the civil code and trying to explain why English common law is better at the Notaire’s office in Cluny, then a little meandering drive into Beaujolais.
It’s chilly and rather misty here but very atmospheric. And I have the fire going back at the cottage, tucking into a cheapish crémant de bourgogne I’ve laced with some oxidised ratafia leftover from summer to make it taste like an aged Demi-sec.
I’d kind of made my peace with Brexit. I’m in two minds about opening up rejoin. Not sure I can put myself through the emotional rollercoaster. The cursory nature of the passport stamp last night in Saint Exupery and the recent legislation in the French senate for British home owners told me not to worry, they have our backs.
I do think that easing back into the single market makes eminent sense. And given recent migration figures is anyone really going to argue that re-implementing free
movement is going to put in question our
massively reduced post-Brexit numbers? Starmer won’t dare do anything so it’s time for the Lib Dems to pick up the baton and put it in the manifesto.
By way of comparison, the USA and Mexico are part of a free trade zone. Is trade between the US and Mexico more open than between the UK and EU post-Brexit?
Posted in error on previous thread.....
Maybe I can answer for Ms Free?
One reason why I believe this scandal has not caught the public's imagination is that it is not Party Political in the normal and general sense of the phrase. It originates back in the days of Blair/Harman, and the perfectly reasonable desire to see the PO brought up to date, although as with much that TB initiated, the follow-through was sadly lacking.
The LDs cop it too. Paula Vennells was appointed by Vince Cable. Jo Swinson was the Minister responsible for the PO during a critical period and seems to have adopted the type of hands off approach that was characteristic of succeeding Governments right the way through to Boris Johnson's. (He must though be credited with authorising the Public Inquiry, whatever else one may say about him.) So you see, they've all had their mucky paws on it, or rather, they have all failed to take the kind of interest that a good owner should, especially once there are signs (and there were plenty) that something, somewhere, is going terribly wrong.
Nor can we expect Starmer to nail his colors to the mast. It is obvious that the current Government is in no hurry to see the Inquiry draw its conclusions. It is now very likely that the final report will be published after the GE. Any reasonable financial settlement is going to be very expensive indeed. Starmer will not want to be too gung-ho about justice for the Subpostmasters because it is very likely his mob that will have to write the cheques.
So there are no winners here in any political Party. Pehaps if there were, we would be hearing a damn sight more about it. And I see no betting angle too, except that the scandal tends to add a little to the miasma of doom and gloom hanging over the Tory Party as it awaits its fate.
Sitting Governments generally take the blame for everything, whatever the realities, as Labour and Starmer will no doubt discover from about next November.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bq3hJtYCNbw
Quite funny when you think about the original leave campaign !
One now hears some small acknowledgement from the EU side that maybe they didn't handle things all that well either. Maybe that is a sign that a more common sense approach that recognises the concerns of all parties will be tried? It could do little harm>
"Only a madman would actually leave the market” Owen Paterson.
It is true that many campaigners on both sides were clear enough that Leave meant leaving the single market. But many were inconsistent and some, such as Michael Gove whom you mention, tried to adopt cake-ist, pie-in-the-sky positions that were utterly unachievable:
"We should be outside the single market. We should have access to the single market, but we should not be governed by the rules that the European Court of Justice imposes on us, which cost business and restrict freedom." Michael Gove
"EU citizens living in this country will have their rights fully protected, and the same goes for British citizens living in the EU. British people will still be able to go and work in the EU; to live; to travel; to study; to buy homes and to settle down.” Boris Johnson.
As for whether Brexit has worked, probably the only person it really worked for was Boris Johnson, for just a couple of years.
Any argument that might have been made for Brexit in terms of democratic accountability has surely been trashed by the contempt Tory politicians have shown for that kind of thing over the last few years.
The Paterson quote is from 2014.
The Johnson quote was after the referendum when he triangulating to win the leadership. He lost to Theresa May.